I am reminded for some reason about an Air Asia (?) flight a few years ago that departed SYD/MEL for KUL (?) where by some fat finger accident one of the pilots initialized the plane's location (while on the ground), skipping or misplacing one decimal point in the lat/long somewhere. He had to do it manually because some FD/GPS system was not correctly functioning or was inop, and then after doing this there was no w…
Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
191–200 of 580 posts
Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
#192You put your life in many other people's hands every time you step into an airport. If you use Chickens, Goats, and Passengers Airlines, expect not to make it to your destination in one piece. 737 NG (-6xx (736), -7xx, -8xx (738), -9xx (739)), MAX, and 787 are reasons not to fly on Boeing equipment. They have both obscure (Ducommun) and well-known history of cutting corners in design, testing, manufacturing, and who…
I disagree with so many things in this post…
1. Commercial airline travel is significantly safer than driving on a per mile or per hour basis
2. This flight was from Dubai to Washington. I don’t think there’s any train routes between these two cities.
Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
#193Pilot (piston engine, with only around 20 hours of light jet dual). As a pax on this flight, I might not have noticed much unless I was looking out the window. This seems like a fault of the crew (obviously), but probably more on the PNF (pilot not flying) than the PF (pilot flying). Article says 4 pilots were on board, but fails to mention that 2 of them (relief pilots) were likely not in the cockpit on the departur…
> My prediction is that almost every pax had no idea how close to dying they came until they read about it later. This is why you should keep the window shade open during taxi, takeoff and landing (a handful of airlines require this, but IME it’s the minority). In the event of a crash or other incident you also want to know what’s outside the plane. Maybe there is burning debris on your side, so you want to exit from…
I'm pretty keeping the shades up outside of cruising altitude is required.
Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
#194The memo from Emirates about not setting altitude in system to airport altitude is so weird. I really hope that's not the actual message Emirates is putting out there. It doesn't matter was in system. You run your checklists and configure for your own flight / your own departure etc. Memo should be to training / recruitment - where did you find these pilots to fly a 777? So they obviously didn't pre-flight the flight…
Wow this looks like a classic corporate response, though in a place where it may actually affect lives.
Let’s not fix the actual issue (not following the proper procedures) but something further down the line which looks like the cause if you have no clue what’s happening.
Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was only ever approximately accurate anyway, a NM is no longer an arc minute because that is inconsistent even along lines of latitude, so it had to be pinned to 1.852km. Aviation, broadly speaking, inherited all of its navigation techniques from the maritime world. In particular, prior to radio methods and to some extent today aviation navigation is based primarily on dead reckoning periodically corrected by obse…
Ironically the metric system suffers the same theoretical "error" as the not-an-arc-minute-anymore NM because the meter was originally defined by taking the distance from pole to equator (to the best of their knowledge at the time) and then shifting the decimal point to get something human scale.
This has not been the case since 1889, when the metre was formally defined as the length of a prototype metre bar. So the metric system has not suffered the same error for more than a century.
Of course, the metric system has not been in use since 1960, but this is also true for the SI.
Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Emirates is a Flag Carrier for UAE, apparently owned by Dubai's government via 'Investment Corporation of Dubai.' There is, therefore, no meaningful distinction between it and its regulator, so don't hold your breath on that hope either. The FAA will demur; bet the rent money on that. We're talking UAE money here, and that means most of the US Senate is on speed dial. No FAA functionaries will be troubling UAE over t…
Airplane manufacturers and regulators being too close is not good, see the MAX MCAS issue, airlines should be completely firewalled from regulators for very obvious reasons. That's pretty bad. Here in NL was have a similar situation where the state is shareholder of KLM/AF leading to all kinds of bizarre decisions in recent times. But at least I'd hope that some people at the regulator would resign rather than avoid…
>airlines should be completely firewalled from regulators for very obvious reasons.
Then we need to be prepared to fund the regulators appropriately. I think part of the problem is they are stretched so thin it becomes impossible to know enough about each system an individual regulator is expected to verify/certify.
Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
#197For the first 24 seconds, the plane didn't leave the ground. Then, while a "normal" departure goes from 2000ft to 2875ft in 30 seconds, this flight went from 1050ft to 3000ft in the same amount of time. Not only the take-off was scary for being to slow to gain altitude, when it started gaining altitude, it did so very quickly.
For passenger who are knowledgeable, this was certainly frightening. Ignorance is bliss for most of us.
Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
The takeoff isn't directly automated, but there's a system called the "flight director" [1] that provides indicators on the pilot flying's display that correspond with a configured trajectory. In this case, it sounds like the flight director was badly misconfigured and the pilots not only omitted to reconfigure it, but followed the erroneous indication far past any point at which it was remotely reasonable (or remote…
So this is the airline equivalent of Michael Scott following his gps into the lake? Insane
I mean, you say that as if it were a joke, and yet I can't fathom any other explanation for this kind of event but that the pilot flying assumed the automation "knows where it's going". Unfortunately, without Rainn Wilson as the PNF...
Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So that when kph/mph is heard a pilot knows they're referencing ground speed, whereas knots is air speed. Who is using MPH/KPH in the course of flying a plane? Why would this ambiguity resolve to “that must be ground speed”? Why would there be ambiguity in a speed readout at all? Surely context and procedure should disambiguate this rather than units?
I'm not actually sure where that quote came from, but yes, there's not likely to be much confusion. Ground speed is usually displayed by some kind of computer, could be a glass panel or just an aviation GPS unit, and is usually marked "GS" or "Kts Ground." And it's sort of considered, philosophically, to be more a navigation thing than an actual flight instrument, since you only really pay attention to it in flight i…
That quote came from the post I replied to originally. Beyond that I’m unsure of the source.
Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My prediction is that almost every pax had no idea how close to dying they came until they read about it later. This is why you should keep the window shade open during taxi, takeoff and landing (a handful of airlines require this, but IME it’s the minority). In the event of a crash or other incident you also want to know what’s outside the plane. Maybe there is burning debris on your side, so you want to exit from…
I'm pretty keeping the shades up outside of cruising altitude is required.
That depends on the airline. El Al used to require them to be closed for ground operations (I assume from some I’ll-conceived “security” reason.)
It’s common for daytime ops from desert airports for the cabin crew to ask you to close them at the gate to minimize heat gain on the aircraft.