Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after takeoff

onemileatatime.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 580 posts

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

#241

Post by dghlsakjg »

mardifoufs wrote: post #146
Pasorrijer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal list is Tier 1 US, Canadian, British and German carriers as well as Qantas. Probably throw Air France and KLM in too. In Africa, Ethiopian would be the only airline I would fly if I had to fly an African airline. I probably would have had a middle eastern airline on the list before I did a project with them last year. After that, I learned a lot that made me stick to the list above.

I've heard Royal Air Maroc is pretty good when it comes to African carriers but I'm not sure. I know they have (or at least used to have) experienced crews and good airframes, but I don't know anything about their maintenance standards

Royal Air Maroc had a senior captain bounce an ATR-72 off the surface of the ocean through pure bad flying in 2018. Literally the belly of the plane scraped the ocean. Basically avoided killing 50 people by a few inches. Wasn’t gonna report it, but the damage gave him away.

Look up air Maroc flight 439

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

#242

Post by EdwardDiego »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #222
nsonha wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pakistan is the only country I’ve ever heard about having that problem. I doubt an advanced economy like UAE would be having this issue.

They hire a lot of international pilots.

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

#243

Post by dvlat »

beef-supreme wrote: post #193
jdavis703 wrote: post #94

Earlier 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.

I also had that impression until a flight attendant of Virgin Airlines insisted on me keeping them closed during takeoff.

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

#244

Post by jackweirdy »

nexuist wrote: post #180
jacquesm wrote: post #145

On another note: I think that having Boeing 777 in the title here is a bit misleading, this was an Emirates aircraft and Boeing had nothing to do with this incident. Suggest replacing 'Boeing 777' in the title with 'Emirates aircraft'

I'll play devil's advocate and suggest that it is a systems error that the 777 accepted an altitude of 0 without sounding an alarm or at least requiring prior confirmation. It shouldn't be that easy to almost total the airplane.

Bear in mind there are airports in the world at less than 0ft sea level. Very complicated to validate what a valid input actually is

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

#245

Post by woofcat »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #237
nexuist wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll play devil's advocate and suggest that it is a systems error that the 777 accepted an altitude of 0 without sounding an alarm or at least requiring prior confirmation. It shouldn't be that easy to almost total the airplane.

I don't understand why the automation feature in question is even available during takeoff. What would be a situation in which use of the FD at this point in the flight would be a preferable option?

IFR?

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

#246

Post by itisit »

jacquesm wrote: post #145

On another note: I think that having Boeing 777 in the title here is a bit misleading, this was an Emirates aircraft and Boeing had nothing to do with this incident. Suggest replacing 'Boeing 777' in the title with 'Emirates aircraft'

Or use the article’s title: Emirates’ (Probably) Terrifying Boeing 777 Flight To Washington

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

#247

Post by usrusr »

kergonath wrote: post #201
mulmen wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to the best of their knowledge at the time I think it was actually extrapolated from a survey of the length of France. No idea how they did that extrapolation.

Initially, yes. The story itself is quite fascinating, and the Wikipedia page on the metre is a good starting point. This was a hot topic during the 19th century as different improvements in the techniques and devices used to measure the Earth showed that the first measurements were imperfect, however good they had been at the time, and that the whole idea is not workable because the Earth is not a sphere. This lead…

I imagine that the mental adjustment from sphere to almost but not quite a sphere must have been harder than a switch from flat earth to spherical. You just expect reality, if it matches a certain mathematical principle, to match perfectly.

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

#248

Post by ahefner »

jdavis703 wrote: post #105
wjossey wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a student pilot, this drives me nuts. The volume of abbreviations, especially in NOTAMS, METARs, etc, is a bit obscene. What’s wonderful too is that the abbreviations are often based on non English words as well, so they aren’t intuitive. As an example, instead of typing “mist” in a METAR it is “BR” based on the French word brume.

And yet, on a general interest site you write in acronyms only pilots and aviation buffs will understand.

Exactly.

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

#249

Post by bandyaboot »

Without knowing much about this Flight Director system, it’s surprising to me it would even attempt to operate in such a configuration—taking off to an altitude of zero feet. I would think it would just display some sort of message or code that’s the equivalent of “you people are on your own with that shit”.

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

#250

Post by nilsbunger »

tshaddox wrote: post #234
op00to wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t. The pilots didn’t do their preflight checklist which would have caught a poorly set up flight computer.

Right, but what I mean is that it shouldn’t be possible to skip those steps and have things coincidentally work because of the state the plane was left in. I’m not a pilot or even much of an aviation geek, so maybe I’m misunderstanding the description of this incident, but it sounds to me like this crew did what they always do, and that normally works fine, but this time it didn’t.

There isn't much in these planes that works "coincidentally" because of a previous flight -- almost all important state has to be reconfigured each flight. The article is over-indexing on the flight director's altitude setting. These guys missed many basic things, like rotating at V1 speed and in general monitoring the plane's situation.
Post reply on HN