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Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

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Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#211

The 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…

It's unbelievable that the pilot's didn't realize they were doing 215 knots while still ON THE GROUND and only decided to pull back on the yoke once they were nearing the end of the runway. They should have at least seen the end of the runway coming up and wondered why they weren't airborne yet. The ends are colored in amber and red as it gets closer to the end, it should be pretty obvious something is wrong. Pull ba…

I think some countries have this problem of fake pilot degrees, is UAE one of those?

Also wonder what kind of training did pilots receive during downtime in COVID to make sure their skills won't decay

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. This was likely a flaps 15° (or maybe 20°) departure (being a heavy departure).

262 is still too high for either of those flap positions according to the above list. So while you may be correct with your comment, it is pretty much without point??? Edit: At least for the topic of this discussion. However, I'll now be able to win a bar bet when someone aks what flaps position for a heavy take off of a 777 would be

Sure. The question becomes "given an airplane that's had a limit airspeed exceeded by about 22% (so aerodynamic loads typically less than 1.5x the placarded limit), what's then the safest course of action for a crew who just minutes ago demonstrated that they were incapable to perform an uncomplicated, utterly standard takeoff procedure?"

Do you want them declaring an emergency, dumping fuel, flying around at night, and coming back for a max weight emergency landing? Or do you want them continuing the flight, sending someone back with a flashlight to look over the wing trailing edge, and continuing on as normally as possible to DC? If my butt or a family member's butt is on that airplane, I don't want these yoke holders trying to figure out and execute the emergency procedure after flunking the standard day one of flight school procedure, while flustered from almost milking themselves, and knowing that they’re looking for a job in the new year. Take a few hours; paint a magenta line all the way to DC and fly it.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#213

So does someone monitor each and every flight for anomalies like this? Or is there some software that takes in the data from each flight and spots differences like this, there could be several more instances in the global data if this is a manual process. Could be an interesting little project, although I guess the data isn't publicly available.

There aren't any traffic police of the sky per se but at least in the US controllers can and do report unusual and potentially violating events like this, I would assume the UAE has similar provisions. For the most part though commercial pilots are assumed to be adequately supervised by their companies, which have various means of doing so.

From a research perspective, the US has a strong model of voluntary reporting of safety events to NASA ASRS which is used by researchers. This is all human-generated rather than automated, but that's probably a good thing since am explicit goal of ASRS is to not be viewed as a punitive or disciplinary system. It has long been found that if people think safety incidents will be used for discipline or evaluation, then they won't report safety incidents - which is the origin of NASA acting as a neutral non-regulatory party to collect this data.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#214
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't matter was in system. You run your checklists and configure for your own flight / your own departure etc. I am not a pilot, but that's exactly what I thought when I read the memo too. They should be putting responsibility for the next flight on the next flight's crew, not the prior flight's crew. Train each crew to assume the plane they're prepping for their next flight is FUBAR in every way, checklist e…

Perhaps this game should be part of the UX of cockpit controls: find the error, or lose your permits.

In the US this is explicitly part of training for major airlines. They will line up failures in The simulator and have the pilots solve/fly through the issue. You can’t fly until you pass these checks

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#215
post #82

The 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…

It goes way beyond checklist stuff. Imagine having an intermediate system in your Tesla, one between fully manual and the autopilot. This system uses the navigation capabilities of the autopilot to draw in the big screen some squares that guide you to your destination without the need to look outside. Something you may find in a videogame. This system is helpfull and easy to use, and allows you to pay attention to mo…

When you say an airline like Emirates, what do you mean? Are they in a certain category of airline?

I’m wondering how to avoid flying on airlines who have bad practices but at present I’m not sure how to tell.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This rings true. I live in Doha and a very good family friend is an instructor in the local flag carrier's training program. He was recently bemoaning the following situation: 1. There was a go-around on some flight or other (for good reason!) 2. Management interpreted this as a failure, and announced that every go-around will now have a full post-mortem with involved pilots requiring more sim time. 3. Pilots now thi…

On that note: I have had a triple go-around and even though everybody was super happy about making their connections on time I personally thought that that was an extremely unsafe landing with the port side wing coming uncomfortably close to the tarmac. Severe windshear, ours was the last flight to land before the airport was closed. The pilot stood at the door to say goodbye to the passengers and was visibly upset.…

This rings very true. My dad is a retired commercial pilot and has a whole evening's worth of rant about this, albeit mostly in the 1970s-80s, before pilot hours were regulated to quite the same extent they are now (and with less automation). He said that his absolute worst was a "double washington" (i.e. London to Washington twice in "a day"), and that on the return leg either him or a co-pilot would really be operating at their physiological limits, at the stressful approach to Heathrow. Turnaround time and load factors are basically the thing that airlines compete on, with the net result that they were strongly encouraged to "man up" and "power on through".

After falling asleep for 10 minutes over the mid-atlantic at some point before I was born, apparently all the pilots in the airline agreed to sleep in shifts for safety reasons, and never told management about it...

He also has a story about a frozen Canada goose coming through the windscreen at FL300 above a dark cloud, but that's a story for another day...

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unbelievable that the pilot's didn't realize they were doing 215 knots while still ON THE GROUND and only decided to pull back on the yoke once they were nearing the end of the runway. They should have at least seen the end of the runway coming up and wondered why they weren't airborne yet. The ends are colored in amber and red as it gets closer to the end, it should be pretty obvious something is wrong. Pull ba…

> How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far beyond my understanding. The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies.

Plane size has zero relevance. The point is that you shouldn’t be flying any jet, even some tiny CRJ, with such basic mistakes.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#219

The 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…

It's unbelievable that the pilot's didn't realize they were doing 215 knots while still ON THE GROUND and only decided to pull back on the yoke once they were nearing the end of the runway. They should have at least seen the end of the runway coming up and wondered why they weren't airborne yet. The ends are colored in amber and red as it gets closer to the end, it should be pretty obvious something is wrong. Pull ba…

> Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft.

I'm not a pilot but this stuff does concern me.

If you Google around for GPS related accidents with cars the results are pretty mind boggling. There's a number of cases of folks driving straight into a lake because GPS told them to go that way. This plane incident reminds me of that.

Re: Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've routinely been asked to close them once we've landed when its hot out (mostly in hot areas of the western US).
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