101–110 of 123 posts
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The hull of a jetliner is about the thickness of sheet metal and disintegrates. The engines are denser and plow through things. Here's NASA footage of a controlled crash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y33N0raKZBo [EDIT: fixed link]
you just linked back in to the ntsb report - clipboard mistake?
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Yeah, but once you decide that the leftmost runway you see (with the dark void on its left) is the left runway, then obviously the parallel strip of lights to the right of it is the right runway. Sure, the lights look odd, and your gut's giving off this feeling, but you see, that's the left runway, and I don't see the right runway anywhere else, so this must be the... They probably got stuck in several cycles of that…
Can you see the X at the beginning of the runway while sitting in the pilot seat? I was told the pilots' eyes are expected to be at mid-windshield height, but pilots prefer their seats in slightly reclined position and no position is compulsory.
On approach you should be looking at the threshold and the numbers. That's right around where the X was, so it would be clearly visible to anyone trying to land on the closed runway. They were not trying to land on that one, and since they were over the taxiway the X was actually two "lanes" away from where they were. I don't think the X is terribly relevant to what happened here.
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i'm not a pilot and have no idea what it looks like when landing a plane at night, so i really shouldn't be commenting here, but: the report says the one operational runway had 2400 ft of approach lighting that was functional. The disabled runway had no approach lighting, and presumably the taxiway didn't have any approach lighting because nobody should be approaching a taxiway. So yes, they were just "off by one", b…
I a am a pilot. At night, after a long flight to a place you don't live at, you are desperately looking to orient yourself. They looked at the charts, saw 2 runways, and found them. It can be extremely disoritening, especially at a place like sfo where there are two parallel sets of runways. What we need is better computer guidance. The tech is available, our legislature is not. Look at the incredible "taking out fre…
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6265932,-122.3812022,15z?hl=...
28L is longer than 28R. Similar to how 28R (or at least its lighting) is longer than taxiway C. The general geometric appearance of the lighting was probably similar enough to what they were used to that it looked mostly correct. As for the X, it was 20 feet wide and about 1000 feet away from where they were aiming, so it would not be relevant to the incident.
Before I couldn't imagine how anyone could make this mistake, but now I see it. The pilots were familiar with SFO and knew that there were two runways, but didn't realize the left hand runway lights were turned off, so they had an off-by-one error when choosing the runway.
This site doesn't let me link to the search results. But search for SFO and you'll see plenty of notices about the runway closure. https://notams.aim.faa.gov/notamSearch/nsapp.html#/
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Does the NTSB do what-ifs? Seems odd for an investigative body to do guesswork on what type of disasters could have occurred.
The NTSB does not do what-ifs in the sense of calculating expected body count had an accident not been averted. They do, however, often investigate the performance envelope involved in an incident/accident and the timeline for possible corrective actions. So in an investigation it's quite common for the NTSB to look into how initiating corrective action at different points in time would have affected the outcome. e.g…
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Storage is cheap today, it wasn't 30 years ago when these rules were put in place (And probably some of the systems manufactured)
Of course the FDR/CVR might be newer but the airframe is 25 years old: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/c-fkck
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The main reason is that computers aren't very smart although I know that even some developers think that. Actually they can autoland but not everywhere and then you still need to tell them where, basically tune them in on the right glide path. Then you really need to be prepared to take over any second, which is a dangerous position on its own. (Just like all self driving cars right now.) It's still possible to selec…
Asiana 214 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214 "Over-reliance on automation and lack of systems understanding by the pilots were cited as major factors contributing to the accident."
They accidentally turned off auto-throttle and took far too long to react to the falling airspeed.
This was a very close call. Initial reports indicated it was like an ordinary go-around. No. "The incident pilots advanced the thrust levers when the airplane was about 85 feet above ground level. Flight data recorder data indicate the airplane was over the taxiway at this time. About 2.5 seconds after advancing the thrust levers, the minimum altitude recorded on the FDR was 59 feet above ground level." They overflew…
Mercury News did a good visualization of how close the AC flight came to contact: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/18/watch-exclusive-animat...
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Mercury News did a good visualization of how close the AC flight came to contact: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/18/watch-exclusive-animat...
I'm utterly amazed at how calm the other pilots sounded as they watched the AC plane fly towards them.