Report Blames Faulty System, Pilot Error for Boeing 737-500 Crash in 2021 (seattletimes.com) 86
346 people died in two separate crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX — one in 2018 and one in 2019. And then in 2021, a Boeing 737-500 crashed in Indonesia, killing all 62 people on board.
Thursday Indonesia's national transportation safety committee (KNKT) released its final report on that 737-500 crash. It found that after takeoff the plane's autothrottle system (which automatically adjusts power to the jet's two engines) became stuck on the right engine, "as a result of friction or binding within the mechanical system," according to the Seattle Times. The newspaper also notes that the same system "had repeatedly malfunctioned on the aircraft before the crash."
The report also blames an inadequate response from the pilots. As the jet climbed away from the runway in Jakarta and the pilots adjusted the autopilot mode to reduce thrust, the autothrottle duly eased back power to the left engine but the right engine continued at full power. The resultant asymmetric thrust caused the plane to turn to the left even as the pilots steered the control wheel to the right and the autopilot followed by moving control surfaces on the wing to roll right. Another system on the plane designed to monitor for asymmetric thrust also malfunctioned and delayed disengaging the autothrottle as it should have.
But as this was happening, the pilots were unaware of it. The pilots should have seen from the instrument panel attitude display that the plane was deviating from its flight path to the left. And they should have noted the right thrust lever not having moved backward like the left lever, alerting them to the asymmetric thrust. They apparently missed both clues.
Just under 5 minutes after takeoff, as the jet banked steeply left, a warning alert sounded in the cockpit: "BANK ANGLE." Two seconds after the alert sounded, at an altitude of 10,700 feet, the pilot in command disengaged the autopilot system to take manual control. This pilot, 54 years old with almost 18,000 hours of flight time, half of that in a 737, clearly didn't realize that the autopilot had been compensating and masking the effect of the asymmetric thrust in the engines. With the autopilot gone, the countering forces from the control surfaces on the wings were removed and "the yaw and roll forces of the asymmetric power rolled the aircraft to the left," the investigation report states.
The pilot was so unaware of what was happening that he steered the control wheel further left instead of right, which "increased the roll tendency of the aircraft to the left." The plane rolled more than 45 degrees left and went nose down.
At that moment, the autothrottle finally disengaged. But it was too late to recover. The flight data stopped recording as the plane crashed into the sea.
The report faults the pilots for their lack of recognition of the situation.
It blames "pilot automation complacency" (overreliance on the automated system) and "confirmation bias" (believing that the plane was steering right as commanded, when in fact it was rolling left).
The Indonesian safety authority found that Sriwijaya Air provided "inadequate" training for its pilots in upset recovery, which means righting an airplane if it inadvertently stalls, rolls or pitches to deviate from the intended flight position. Indonesia now mandates detailed upset recovery training for all airline pilots.
The KNKT report also states that the system that was supposed to monitor the 737's autothrottle for asymmetric thrust and disengage it — the Cruise Thrust Split Monitor — may have been misrigged by maintenance personnel, or its failure may have been due to a sensor fault providing an incorrect value for the positions of the control surfaces on the wings to the autothrottle computer.
The report notes that Boeing is issuing a bulletin to all 737 operators requiring repetitive inspections of the control surface sensors. An Airworthiness Directive that will make this mandatory is pending from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Thursday Indonesia's national transportation safety committee (KNKT) released its final report on that 737-500 crash. It found that after takeoff the plane's autothrottle system (which automatically adjusts power to the jet's two engines) became stuck on the right engine, "as a result of friction or binding within the mechanical system," according to the Seattle Times. The newspaper also notes that the same system "had repeatedly malfunctioned on the aircraft before the crash."
The report also blames an inadequate response from the pilots. As the jet climbed away from the runway in Jakarta and the pilots adjusted the autopilot mode to reduce thrust, the autothrottle duly eased back power to the left engine but the right engine continued at full power. The resultant asymmetric thrust caused the plane to turn to the left even as the pilots steered the control wheel to the right and the autopilot followed by moving control surfaces on the wing to roll right. Another system on the plane designed to monitor for asymmetric thrust also malfunctioned and delayed disengaging the autothrottle as it should have.
But as this was happening, the pilots were unaware of it. The pilots should have seen from the instrument panel attitude display that the plane was deviating from its flight path to the left. And they should have noted the right thrust lever not having moved backward like the left lever, alerting them to the asymmetric thrust. They apparently missed both clues.
Just under 5 minutes after takeoff, as the jet banked steeply left, a warning alert sounded in the cockpit: "BANK ANGLE." Two seconds after the alert sounded, at an altitude of 10,700 feet, the pilot in command disengaged the autopilot system to take manual control. This pilot, 54 years old with almost 18,000 hours of flight time, half of that in a 737, clearly didn't realize that the autopilot had been compensating and masking the effect of the asymmetric thrust in the engines. With the autopilot gone, the countering forces from the control surfaces on the wings were removed and "the yaw and roll forces of the asymmetric power rolled the aircraft to the left," the investigation report states.
The pilot was so unaware of what was happening that he steered the control wheel further left instead of right, which "increased the roll tendency of the aircraft to the left." The plane rolled more than 45 degrees left and went nose down.
At that moment, the autothrottle finally disengaged. But it was too late to recover. The flight data stopped recording as the plane crashed into the sea.
The report faults the pilots for their lack of recognition of the situation.
It blames "pilot automation complacency" (overreliance on the automated system) and "confirmation bias" (believing that the plane was steering right as commanded, when in fact it was rolling left).
The Indonesian safety authority found that Sriwijaya Air provided "inadequate" training for its pilots in upset recovery, which means righting an airplane if it inadvertently stalls, rolls or pitches to deviate from the intended flight position. Indonesia now mandates detailed upset recovery training for all airline pilots.
The KNKT report also states that the system that was supposed to monitor the 737's autothrottle for asymmetric thrust and disengage it — the Cruise Thrust Split Monitor — may have been misrigged by maintenance personnel, or its failure may have been due to a sensor fault providing an incorrect value for the positions of the control surfaces on the wings to the autothrottle computer.
The report notes that Boeing is issuing a bulletin to all 737 operators requiring repetitive inspections of the control surface sensors. An Airworthiness Directive that will make this mandatory is pending from the Federal Aviation Administration.
No pilots on board (Score:4, Insightful)
Only autopilot operators. Same story over and over.
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But is it reasonable to ask even a Bovine land Barge not to use the toilet during a flight? And, in a plane full of people, couldn't you compensate for even 500lbs slowly shifting about? But on second thought, how could such a person squeeze into one of those toilets?
Re: No pilots on board (Score:2)
Re: No pilots on board (Score:5, Interesting)
In the case of the 737-Max, I've argued quite aggressively that the fault was of the aircraft manufacturer and blaming the pilots is ridiculous even if they made mistakes. They can't possibly handle a situation where a secret piece of equipment fails.
However, the OP's post is pretty valuable here and I hope the mis-moderation is corrected. We saw in the Ethiopian airlines 737-Max and the crash here that pilots' first instinct when a problem arises is to get the automation engaged under the premise that it will solve everything. That's a problem. If something goes wrong, the instinct should be to disengage as much automation as possible and do stick-and-rudder flying because it simplified the situation. But to have that instinct you need to have skills and confidence in your own abilities.
You also need to fly in a safety culture where you don't fear getting penalized for taking manual control, turning around, and putting the plane right back down at the departure airport.
It's often the case that pilots are given three hard problems to solve and three minutes to do so. They get two and half of them correct and the crash is called "pilot error." But in this case, the auto-throttle was malfunctioning for a full five minutes and noticeable via the flight path, the instrumentation, and the physical position of the throttle levers. The pilots didn't notice until a warning signal sounded and then they reacted in a panic.
Being a pilot is very hard because most of the time the plane largely flies itself but you need to avoid getting lulled into complacency and constantly be ready to take over. And then taking over requires immense skill. That's part of the job.
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I am not a airliner pilot or even a pilot. Are you out of curiosity? I am not trying to be critical or contradictory here just looking at other experiences and wondering if this is attitude or technically informed.
One possible analogy (and maybe its not - would like to hear from a pilot) is a car on packed snow/ice. There are lot of people that go around thinking 'they' can do better at correcting the situation than ABS + stability control. This is by and large false. Even a professional driver can as a r
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If the ABS is malfunctioning, you are better off turning it off. You can't generally do that on current cars, but if for example, ABS is only working on the left, not the right, as soon as it engages, you will go into a spin.
If the ABS *might* be malfunctioning, and you have experience driving on packed snow or ice, you are still on average better off turning it off. I drove for thousands and thousands of miles in the snow before ABS and never had an uncorrectable problem, so it can be done.
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The issue is that, once it has been determined that something is not functioning properly (i.e. failed sensor, et cetera), one needs to assess the situation and be able to take over. The so
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You have misunderstood the problem ABS tries to solve. ABS tries to solve the problem of inexperienced drivers attempting to maintain control on unfamiliar surfaces.
In almost all cases, an inexperienced driver, when encountering slippery surfaces, will jam on the brakes until they slide into whatever is in front of them. ABS helps in this case by making the actual stopping distances shorter, thereby mitigating at least some the damage caused by an inexperienced driver.
However, an experienced driver, u
Blaming human error leads to more deaths (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Makes it hard to make mistakes
2. Makes it easy to recognize you made a mistake
3. Make it easy to fix a mistake
4. Minimize the impact of a mistake
Autopilots and eventually self driving cars are good things because people suck at doing things over and over again without making mistakes. We need to figure out how to ensure humans still have the skills needed when the autopilot fails. The Indonesian report is a good one because it makes general recommendations that will save lives in the future.
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It also possible that the throttle was stuck so bad that
It's also possible that angry unicorns broke into the cockpit and poked out the crew's eyes with their horns and then sat on the throttle. Except neither that nor the fiction you imagine are in the analysis. What is in the analysis is clear evidence of shit maintenance and shit piloting. Dealing with equipment failures are what the pilots are for. If we could rely on the gear then we wouldn't have pilots.
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I haven't had time to read the story, so take this with that in mind, but I would expect if the throttle lever was stuck, the CVR would have some pilots' comments about that?
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Only autopilot operators. Same story over and over.
Did anyone ask Elon how the system should be used?
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Maybe - surely certainly - some pilots, but not all. My sister's father-in-law is was a military, then commercial pilot for decades. It was a calling for him, and many of his colleagues. He had a healthy disdain and skepticism for auto-anything. Auto-pilot, auto-drive, auto-brew coffee...
He often tells us about things non-pilots don't think about, like: if one member of the flight crew leaves his/her seat (e.g. to use the head), the other has to don and activate an oxygen mask. Just in case. He'd poin
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This is a 737 classic, a 1984 facelift for a 1967 vintage aircraft. Baerly computerised. Besides, there have been far more accidends back in the 1960s-1980s despite people being supposedly trained as pilots first due to lack of automation and generally fewer flights than nowadays.
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Computerised enough for the pilots not to have a clue what the autopilot was up to and lose control when it was switched off.
Why Auto anything near the ground (Score:3, Interesting)
As a small plane pilot, I wonder if it is that hard to manually control throttles, stick and rudder. That way you know what is happening. All the time. Autopilot for the cruise, but at altitude there is time to think.
There have been other autothrottle accidents where the system worked perfectly but was on the wrong setting and pilots flew into the ground. Air Asiana crash at SFO comes to mind (pilot Wei Tu Lo ...).
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As a small plane pilot, I wonder if it is that hard to manually control throttles, stick and rudder. That way you know what is happening. All the time. Autopilot for the cruise, but at altitude there is time to think.
And this is why General Aviation has such a stellar safety record compared to commercial airlines...
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As a small plane pilot, I wonder if it is that hard to manually control throttles, stick and rudder. That way you know what is happening. All the time. Autopilot for the cruise, but at altitude there is time to think.
There have been other autothrottle accidents where the system worked perfectly but was on the wrong setting and pilots flew into the ground. Air Asiana crash at SFO comes to mind (pilot Wei Tu Lo ...).
I was riding copilots seat on a corporate King Air and noticed on takeoff the pilot had pretty heavy rudder input. Then after reaching cruising speed, the throttles were set offset to each other. I asked the pilot about this and he said the throttle cables needed to be recalibrated, so the thrust was asymmetric when both engines had the same throttle input. I'm pretty sure this isn't as extreme a situation as the 737 pilots faced, but a pilot that is comfortable with their aircraft can recognize this kin
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As a small plane pilot, I wonder if it is that hard to manually control throttles, stick and rudder. That way you know what is happening. All the time. Autopilot for the cruise, but at altitude there is time to think.
There have been other autothrottle accidents where the system worked perfectly but was on the wrong setting and pilots flew into the ground. Air Asiana crash at SFO comes to mind (pilot Wei Tu Lo ...).
I was riding copilots seat on a corporate King Air and noticed on takeoff the pilot had pretty heavy rudder input. Then after reaching cruising speed, the throttles were set offset to each other. I asked the pilot about this and he said the throttle cables needed to be recalibrated, so the thrust was asymmetric when both engines had the same throttle input. I'm pretty sure this isn't as extreme a situation as the 737 pilots faced, but a pilot that is comfortable with their aircraft can recognize this kind of scenario.
Curious how talking about flying a plane with asymmetric thrust is considered off topic when discussing an article of a plane that crashed due to asymmetric thrust.
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Curious how talking about flying a plane with asymmetric thrust is considered off topic when discussing an article of a plane that crashed due to asymmetric thrust.
Welcome to /. ...
[ Next thing you know, it'll be mod'ed Troll. ]
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Got you covered bro, I modded informative. AC for obvs.
Thanks, I thought my post was at least relevant to the article :)
Re:Perhaps I'm mistaken (Score:4, Interesting)
Autopilots have existed since before WW1, autothrottles since WW2. Computers aren't actually required for that. This crash was primarily caused by pilots being inattentive, not by automation.
If you read the report, it says that they have simulated this flight with multiple pilots and all of them had no difficulties to recover, they simply needed a quck glance at their instruments to recognise asymmetric thrust.
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"Nothing defines "right wing" better than an assumption that the policies they support won't apply to them".
And "left wing" too, of course.
Common sense beats blinkered ideology every time.
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But it seems to me that commercial airline pilots appears to be trained as computer operators rather than people who can actually fly a plane.
That may be oversimplifying it, but probably not far off from the truth. I, who am not a pilot, concluded from the fact that the right engine was overpowering the left engine that the plane would head left. Working backward should have come to the same conclusion. When your yaw is not where it should be there's something wrong. First thing you'd want to do is disengage the autopilot, because you, as a pilot, know how to best handle the situation. But maybe you don't.
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Don't forget that this is happening during climb out so you don't have a great view of the ground as a reference. Also, it looks like the flightpath had a gradual right-hand turn almost 180 degrees before the autopilot was disengaged. Sriwijaya Air Flight 182 [wikipedia.org]
Possibly the combination autopilot and additional right banking the pilot applied still resulted in a much wider turn than they anticipated and they started looking for the cause. When the autopilot was disengaged and stopped correcting for the asymm
Re:Perhaps I'm mistaken (Score:5, Informative)
AF447 has a lot more to it that just “the pilots didnt look at the altimeter” - a faulty sensor which iced up (which Airbus had already issued a maintenance requirement for, and Air France were working through the fleet to replace) caused an air speed mismatch between the redundant sets of sensors, which the autopilot legitimately flagged up to the pilots and disconnected (automated systems cannot make decisions based on data they know to be unreliable) - the issue then is what the pilots did.
Airbus has a set checklist to follow in these circumstances (all manufacturers do, its a certification standard - when X goes wrong, what do the pilots do? X, then Y, then Z) and in this case the checklist said “manually fly the aircraft at a set nose up attitude and a set throttle setting, identify the sensor with the issue, clear the issue”.
The pilots did not follow the checklist, and instead stalled the aircraft by raising the nose significantly - there was no indication they actually followed the checklist at all.
It wasnt until a senior pilot, until then resting in the cabin of the aircraft, entered the cockpit and immediately identified the issue, told the pilots to push the nose down - unfortunately they had run out of altitude and they hit the ocean before they could recover from the stall.
Asiana Flight 214 is a better example of underskilled pilots - being forced to fly a semi manual approach into SFO, they were unused to how the aircraft handled as they had experienced so few semi manual approaches, as as such got the aircraft into major difficulties and crashed the aircraft with no external faults being responsible.
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If you're in a stall you try and level out, increase power and gain speed. Its piloting 101. What you don't do is raise the nose then wonder why you're still in a stall. Those guys had no idea how to fly a plane, they were just computer operators.
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They got into a stall by not following the checklist for a airspeed data mismatch, which says fly at a set AoA and throttle setting.
They also didnt know they were in a stall once they had induced that stall, so they kept hard back on the stick.
Lots of fuckery all around, but the initial checklists were not followed.
Re:Perhaps I'm mistaken (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well put, on all counts.
The reason you can't just "even out and increase power" is those engines takes quite some time to spool up—you have to pitch slightly down, and that is indeed standard training for them when receiving any kind of stall warning.
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They were nowhere near coffin corner for most of their descent down to the ocean so that argument is BS.
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It wasn't a full instrument out , it was failed pitot tubes and hence speed indicators, nothing more! Why don't you read up on something before you post next time.
All the other instruments were working including the altimeter, artificial horizon and GPS ground speed so had zero excuse not to prevent the stall except total incompetance.
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Re:Perhaps I'm mistaken (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasnt until a senior pilot, until then resting in the cabin of the aircraft, entered the cockpit and immediately identified the issue, told the pilots to push the nose down - unfortunately they had run out of altitude and they hit the ocean before they could recover from the stall.
Actually the captain (who had been in the rest area) didn't identify the issue either. It was the first officer who eventually figured it out, but only when he realised that the junior pilot in command was pulling back on the stick the whole time, and by then it was too late to perform a stall recovery.
The thing is though, with the Airbus philosophy (where the computer does more and more of the work), this scenario can now be programmed out so that it can't happen again. I used to be quite critical of the Airbus philosophy, but it does allow for a better accumulation of safety knowledge than Boeing does, because the computers eventually learn from more and more corner cases. It's ultimately one of those things where in an emergency you'd probably be better of with a great pilot on a Boeing, but if you've got only an average pilot you'd be better off in the Airbus.
Airbus joy stick (Score:4, Funny)
The trouble was the two joysticks, not interconnected like a normal plane. So moving one had no effect on the other.
Ultimately you replace the copilot with a dog. Pilot's job is to feed the dog. Dog's job is to bite the pilot if they try to touch the controls...
Re: Airbus joy stick (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Airbus joy stick (Score:3)
Welcome to the modern world, full of the softest, saddest fucks to ever walk the planet...
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https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]
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I disagree with your final comment about Boeing vs Airbus because it doesnt make sense.
If you are trained to fly the aircraft, are competent and do your job well, it doesnt matter what aircraft you are in.
Reminder that an Airbus A330 holds the record for the worlds longest unpowered glide - 120km from dual engine flameout (due to fuel exhaustion) to touchdown. It was the skill of the pilots which did that. Air Transat 236.
And during the investigation into US Airways 1549 it was shown that Airbuses flight
Re: Perhaps I'm mistaken (Score:1)
I disagree with your final comment about Boeing vs Airbus because it doesnt make sense.
Perhaps you should wait until something makes sent to you before deciding whether to agree or disagree with it.
Re: Perhaps I'm mistaken (Score:1)
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Asiana Flight 214 they tried blame the first respo (Score:2)
Asiana Flight 214 they tried blame the first responder for running over that one victim
Re:Perhaps I'm mistaken (Score:4, Insightful)
A related incident happened with the crash of the air france A330 where the "pilots" apparetly didn't bother to check their altimeter at all and ended up doing a controlled crash into the atlantic.
If you are referring to the Air France Flight 447, I think that is a gross mischaracterization of what happened. Again a combination of system design of displayed information and control operation, equipment failure, and pilot error led to the crash. The main pilot failure was not following the established procedure for unreliable airspeed indication but they were undoubtedly confused by the presented information and did not know what to trust. If anything it underscores the tendency of even highly trained and experienced people to persist in a belief of what is happening instead of critically attacking the problem. A key problem was the control set up and information display created a situation where it was difficult for the crew to coordinate their response.
No excuses here because they had enough experience that they should have done better but the failure was much more complicated than not watching an altimeter.
Perhaps it might be a good idea if ALL commercial pilots were required to learn to fly small manual aircraft first before they start the airliner training in a simulator.
I am not sure what you are getting at here. The commercial simulators provide a very real flying experience. Also I would think that most pilots start out with a basic flying certification that necessitates flying a small aircraft.
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"The commercial simulators provide a very real flying experience"
Unless they can simulate 360 degs of gravity , no they don't. They provide a real flying experience for a limited subset of situations.
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First off, "360 degs of gravity" (I don't know what that is) is not necessary for a simulator to provide a very real experience. It's well known that the feel of gravity is not helpful while flying on instruments.
Commercial aircraft simulators from CAE and L3Harris are extremely realistic, but then again at $7M or so you would hope that would be the case.
Second, real world experience in a simulator or actual flying hours are not necessarily what is required. There is plenty of research that points to th
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"First off, "360 degs of gravity" (I don't know what that is) is not necessary for a simulator to provide a very real experience"
A simulator cannot provide the full G forces experienced in an aircraft. At most it can simulate 1G + a bit (as it moves). Plenty of unexpected aircraft moves can produce multiple Gs for many seconds which can seriously impede the pilot. There's a reason fast jet pilots learn most of their skills in the cockpit.
"develop critical problem solving skills in a group"
Flying an aircraft
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Flying an aircraft is not the same as having a management meeting about the latest paper clip sales. Someone needs to be in charge which is why aircraft have captains.
Yet that is the area of critical problem management that safety experts say needs to be addressed, not more flight time or more realistic simulation. G-forces are not the issue. Regarding the "captain": many disasters are rooted in cockpit hierarchy where critical information is suppressed and correct solutions are ignored.
Crisis management is not "paper clip sales". Good grief.
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Pilot licensing is a ladder. The first rung is a private pilot's license and a couple hundred hours of flying time. You don't just walk into ATP academy and they stick you in an airliner sim.
So much for "the Boeing way" (Score:2, Offtopic)
I have read so often that this kind of crash can only happen in an Airbus because the sidesticks and the thrust levers in an Airbus are not moving. This is a counterexample for the thrust levers, there are two counterexamples for the yokes.
https://aviation-safety.net/wi... [aviation-safety.net]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:So much for "the Boeing way" (Score:5, Interesting)
Boeing likes to make huge changes to aircraft without informing pilots or requiring additional pilot training - because thats an expense that would cost it sales.
For example, take a look at the Kegworth air disaster in 1989, involving the then brand new Boeing 737-400.
A faulty engine was the ultimate cause of the crash, but major contributing factors included redesigned throttle controls (with no independent autothrottles - so each engine can be set to one setting on the throttle but actually be at 90% and 10% with no obvious indication), redesigned air conditioning systems (swapped the engine the bleed air was taken from, so pilots detecting smoke in the cabin thought the wrong engine was at fault) and a redesigned cockpit instrument layout, which moved things like engine vibration levels to a place pilots were not expected to look at.
If none of the above was changed, or the pilots were retrained on the new model, the flight would have landed safely albeit with one engine shut down.
Instead, it crashed short of the runway.
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This is a crisis of change management. There's good reason for change, especially instrument layouts. The airline / military industry is in the absolute forefront of effective HMI designs and improvements. The major issue is the training part.
One should note that's not just Boeing. The damn airlines are the ones doing a lot of corner cutting, and in the case of the MAX recently were the ones actually asking Boeing to design a plane so they wouldn't need to retrain pilots.
There's plenty of blame to go around
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Exactly this. One of the lessons we were supposed to have learned from Kegworth is that you can't just give pilots some stuff to read and then have them jump straight into a new variant with no sim time. This lesson had clearly been forgotten by the time the MAX came along.
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I have read so often that this kind of crash can only happen in an Airbus because the sidesticks and the thrust levers in an Airbus are not moving. This is a counterexample for the thrust levers, there are two counterexamples for the yokes.
https://aviation-safety.net/wi... [aviation-safety.net]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Right. Safety feature isn't 100% reliable so it's worthless, yeah?
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No. You bought Boeing's marketing line, nothing more. Boeing not having a fly-by-wire system is not a safety feature. It was just their attempt at negative marketing competitors who implemented a different system.
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No. You bought Boeing's marketing line, nothing more. Boeing not having a fly-by-wire system is not a safety feature. It was just their attempt at negative marketing competitors who implemented a different system.
So you don't believe that having visual and tactile feedback is useful? Please explain.
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As you pointed out, it's a double edged sword. The moving throttles give extra feedback, but they can get jammed. It's not the first time a jammed throttle level and autothrottle has caused an accident.
At the same time, with a fly by wire system you can provide moving controls and force feedback if you decide that's important.
A bigger issue is probably the 737's use of the older master caution system instead of EICAS. EICAS shows warnings in a central location and identifies or shows checklists for dealing
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So you don't believe that having visual and tactile feedback is useful? Please explain.
a) there is visual feedback to what the copmuter is doing, just not moving the control input. In either case you need to be trained to know where to look for your visual feedback (and pilots don't routinely look down at their throttles, especially during a crisis)
b) tactile feedback is largely useless for pilots, it just fights them. Additionally there are too many control elements to have tactical feedback about all current actions being undertaken.
If you want an example of this, there's a story on Slashdo
Well, you got the automated "helpful" stuff (Score:1)
The helpful gadgetry is there, so it's going to be used. Lots of pilot training to NOT rely on all that stuff is going to be a tricky message, because should the pilot NOT use it and the plane comes down, then that's pilot error too.
Notice that the complaint really is that despite 9000 hours of flying a 737 the captain didn't have a full mental model of every gadget in use so "didn't realise" that one gadget was doing that one thing and with it disabled it was no longer doing that one thing. Along with all
Not a MAX crash (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does the summary lead with the MAX crashes, when the entire article is about a non-MAX crash, completely unrelated to MCAS and other Boeing shenanigans?
It almost appears as if someone tried to juxtapose the MAX crashes (very much the fault of Boeing) to another crash caused by pilot error, thereby giving the impression that eventually Indonesian authorities found out that it was really the pilots' fault for the MAX crashes all along. At least I got this impression in my first cursory reading.
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Well, historically it's something like 70% of accidents have a human component.
It's really a problem caused by the fact that the modern airplane is extremely reliable that failures of mechanical components are a rarity, at least to the point where they cause an accident. There's enough redundancy that even when a system fails, the backup usually just takes over to ensured continue safety of flight.
Accidents like the MAX MCAS which was caused by the angle of attack
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In this case, both of the guys on the flight deck didn't do their job and fly the plane or use their instruments.
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Welcome (Score:1)
To the world of third world maintenance and third world pilots. Don't fix anything, don't train anybody.
Re:the 737-500 is a hack (Score:4)
You know the 737-500 is a OLD plane right? Its not the MAXX.
Re: (Score:2)
You know the CRASH REPORT IS ABOUT THE 737-500 right? And for all those added range added capacity planes, they stick on an added length of tube in the middle and put on bigger engines. Those planes are all literally hacks.
It figures a Trumpist retard who doesn't like democracy (as evidenced by your 'repeal the 17th amendment' sig) would be so stupid as to not even be able to understand the title of the post. Take your gerrymandering retarded ass elsewhere, and let grown ups talk.
Small wonder (Score:2)
"It blames "pilot automation complacency" (overreliance on the automated system) "
Which is deadly in a Boeing.
Cruise control (Score:1)
They said similar about the Max... (Score:1)
until it was proven that they were lying their arses off.
let's see what the pilot's association has to say on this.
Why No Readouts to Show Real Versus Settings? (Score:2)
It's Slashdot, so a car analogy: Imagine a big 8 cylinder muscle car with a a silent engine. It will have a foot pedal for the throttle ('the gas') to increase power to the engine. It will also have a tachometer to see how much actual power or throttle is being delivered from the engine. If the driver takes their foot off the pedal and there is a fault in the linkage between the gas pedal and the engine throttle and the engine doesn't disengage, the driver will see it on the tachometer. The driver can easil
IFR rating and lack of training. (Score:2)
The report faults the pilots for their lack of recognition of the situation.
It blames "pilot automation complacency" (overreliance on the automated system) and "confirmation bias" (believing that the plane was steering right as commanded, when in fact it was rolling left).
Did either of the guys on the flight deck look at the artificial horizon? I doubt it because mistaking a roll left from a roll right is easy to determine if you look at the damn instrument.
As the jet climbed away from the runway in Jakarta and the pilots adjusted the autopilot mode to reduce thrust, the autothrottle duly eased back power to the left engine but the right engine continued at full power. The resultant asymmetric thrust caused the plane to turn to the left even as the pilots steered the control wheel to the right and the autopilot followed by moving control surfaces on the wing to roll right. Another system on the plane designed to monitor for asymmetric thrust also malfunctioned and delayed disengaging the autothrottle as it should have.
There are also gauges in the middle of the console one set for each engine that shows you engine power, temperature, etc. You can visually see if one engine is pushing too hard at a glance, you just have to look.
18000 hours? No, this was a guy who didn't train and didn't trust his instrumentation which could have avoided
Asian airline culture (Score:2)
There's some sort of cultural issue affecting Asian airlines. The airplane in question had thirty-two reports of autothrottle malfunction. That's too many. There was no proactive initiative to take the aeroplane, diagnose and repair the issue.
The pilots had no skills. Nobody was monitoring the airplane flight path. When the asymmetric thrust issue triggered a bank angle warning, the pilot banked the airplane further in the wrong direction.
Nobody noticed that one throttle lever wasn't moving with the other.