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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

#251

Post by manuko83 »

kortilla wrote: post #217
dehrmann wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You shouldn't be flying a Cessna 152 if you can't follow a checklist. Although I would wait until the investigation is finished...it's hard to know what goes on in the cockpit until all the data is gathered and analysed.

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

#252

Post by azth »

WalterBright wrote: post #184
kchoudhu wrote: post #127

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…

My dad flew for 20 years in the Air Force. He more than once defied procedure that would have put him in jeopardy on a flight. He told me he was not going to die because of a bureaucratic rule written by someone whose ass was safely behind a desk. One was when formation flying, pilots were to keep both eyes on the lead, and mimic his flying. This led to several crashes where the whole team died because the lead flew…

> That wasn't going to happen to my dad, either, and he kept a length of iron pipe at hand to beat the student into letting go of the controls.

That's awesome haha. Hope your dad is well.

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

#253

Post by carlmr »

throwawayboise wrote: post #223
nickjj wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would hope I would not drive into a lake or any other obvious hazard, but I have driven the wrong way onto a one-way portion of a street when I was following Google Maps.

My gf once asked me why I wouldn't just park on the street, it was night, it was Delft (Netherlands), it was very still standing water in one of the canals with leaves on top.

It did look surprisingly like a street, but I knew I was in Delft.

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

#254

Post by [deleted] »

nomel wrote: post #124
wpearse wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The checklists bring the aircraft back to a known state. One 777 pilot commented to say that this issue should have been caught by at least two checklists, implying that neither checklists had been followed. Tangentially: if my 2006 Mercedes is reset (battery disconnected) it needs to idle for 20 minutes to re-learn the idle pattern. The vehicle then needs to be driven around for a bit to re-learn driving patterns. I…

> The checklists bring the aircraft back to a known state. No, it doesn't, clearly. It provides a procedure that can be followed to put it to a known state, but its existence does not put it into a known state, with certainty. A reset puts it into a known state, with certainty. That known reset state probable wouldn't be useful, but can be set to be least-damaging, where a checklist can then be used to then put it in…

[deleted]

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

#255

Post by nilsbunger »

onphonenow wrote: post #16

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…

The "black hole effect" is one mitigating factor - if you take off on a moonless night, it is surprisingly disorienting, and can become debilitating. These pilots missed a bunch of very basic things like rotating at V1. Maybe they got totally disoriented and it incapacitated them? Good training is supposed to prevent that. This wasn't a "missed an item on a checklist" story.

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

#256

Post by ohashi »

josephcsible wrote: post #236
errcorrectcode wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're making a strawman just to be disagreeable without adding anything constructive: 1. I never recommended driving. It's awful for the environment and extremely unsafe. 2. Transoceanic train lines. Hyperloop or similar. Do you have anything else to add?

> Transoceanic train lines These don't exist, and probably won't for the foreseeable future. What should we all do until then?

internet shitposting?

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

#257

Post by krisoft »

argvargc wrote: post #129
munchler wrote: post #29

Why is it even possible to enter a desired altitude of 0 feet into an automatic pilot? As a layman, it’s hard for me to imagine why anyone flying a 777 would want to maintain an altitude of zero at full speed for more than a few seconds (if that).

This seems a very important question, and I'm not finding answers to it satisfactory. To elaborate, why isn't an autopilot "aware" of whether the aircraft is taking-off/landing or in-flight? It seems completely mad that an automated flying mode could be engaged in such an obviously suicidal way on a modern bulk carrier aircraft, without so much as a blaring warning and red flashing lights.

> It seems completely mad that an automated flying mode could be engaged in such an obviously suicidal way on a modern bulk carrier aircraft, without so much as a blaring warning and red flashing lights.

You are assuming that there weren't blaring warnings and red flashing lights. Probably there were many.

> To elaborate, why isn't an autopilot "aware" of whether the aircraft is taking-off/landing or in-flight?

Autopilots are much simpler systems. I don't know how much you know about them, but people in the general public believe they are some AI which flies the airplane from A to B. In reality they have much more common with a thermostat than an AI. You set a target heading and the plane will bank to match it. You set a target height and the plane will pitch to match it. Yes yes, they have many modes, and some modes can do much more complicated things than these, but it is not there to replace the pilot. It is a tool to alleviate dead simple piloting tasks so the pilots fatigue less on long flights.

Just as an example how simple stupid they are: You can command the autopilot to climb, and if you don't adjust the throttle appropriately (either manually, or by enabling the autopilot to adjust it) then the plane will use up all the airspeed during the climb and the autopilot will happily fly it into a stall.

Also just a general rule about aviation incidents/accidents: It is a good idea to wait for a proper investigation report before running far with all kind of assumptions about what happened, and therefore what you think should be changed.

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

#258

Post by azth »

Pasorrijer wrote: post #101
dataflow wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I catch heat every time I mention that air crew training and certification standards are not uniform across the globe and that I am reluctant to fly on many foreign-flag carriers. (However, Emirates and most EU-flag carriers are ones that I would not hesitate to fly on.) Has anyone made some sort of a rough list of which carriers one can feel safe on?

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 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.

Are you able to elaborate? My email address is in my profile if you want to share in private.

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

#259

Post by ipython »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #59
pdonis wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think passengers would have noticed this as anything other than a regular takeoff It looks like the aircraft didn't leave the runway until the runway safety area at the end. That is something any passenger looking out the window could notice. A normal takeoff has the aircraft leaving the runway well before the end.

> That is something any passenger looking out the window could notice. I don't think so, because the departure was at 3:10AM local time (23:10Z). It would have been too dark to perceive.

You can see the lighted markers along the side of the runway indicating the number of thousand feet of runway remaining. I’d definitely be concerned as we pass by 2…1…and still not rotated.

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

#260

Post by MBCook »

bumby wrote: post #187
WalterBright wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting comparing this with the 737MAX crashes. There, I regularly get excoriated on HN for suggesting that the pilots not knowing to turn off the stab trim system when it goes haywire is unreasonable, despite it being a "memory item" and despite Emergency Airworthiness Directives reiterating this.

It’s because from a safety standpoint, procedural controls are not preferable to engineered controls. PPE controls are lower still. It would be like alleviating a motorcycle manufacturer from responsibility of a bad design by claiming riders wouldn’t be hurt if they were wearing all their protective gear. It may be true while also being sub-standard design practice for a safety-critical system.

Isn’t that exactly what Tesla does? Deflect all autopilot/FSD blame on users because they were supposed to be “in charge“?
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