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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

#431

Post by jacquesm »

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.

It can go a lot lower than zero, and there are quite a few airfields where this matters:

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/56894/why-is-0-...

Besides: you can't fix stupid, if someone switches on the autopilot seconds after wheels up without checking what altitude it is set for it could be anything, including below ground level. Autopilots aren't magic, and pilots have a very large amount of discretion in how they fly the airplane, but these pilots weren't really prepared to fly the plane for one second more than they had to.

There is a reason they got sacked. Oh, and as to this being a Boeing issue: this setting can be entered on any autopilot. I'm all for giving Boeing shit when they are the ones that messed up but here they didn't.

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

#432

Post by xattt »

PKop wrote: post #361
ImaCake wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've just gone from a 2004 Corolla to a 2020 Serrato. It's a low end car but it has lane assist, braking detection when a car slows in front, cruise, speed limiter, etc. Combine all those settings with google maps and it easy for me to see how you could get complacent driving a new car and make mistakes. All these features work well most of the time, but they all notably fail on, still frequent, edge cases.

Yes and as with Tesla "FSD", supposedly the driver is to devote full attention to monitoring the car whenever activated. But this is silly because as these tools get better, the driver will inevitably monitor less. But it won't any time soon (ever?) avoid random errors every now and then. But now these will be catastrophic failures.

Driver training should be updated to include what to do when self-driving modes are used (ie what do you actually do to supervise the vehicle, which checks to do, etc).

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

#434

Post by ngcc_hk »

ImaCake wrote: post #333
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've just gone from a 2004 Corolla to a 2020 Serrato. It's a low end car but it has lane assist, braking detection when a car slows in front, cruise, speed limiter, etc. Combine all those settings with google maps and it easy for me to see how you could get complacent driving a new car and make mistakes. All these features work well most of the time, but they all notably fail on, still frequent, edge cases.

Using a Hyundai hybrid and it got all these. It helped quite a lot as long as you consider yourselves a driver and in control.

Still it is very weird when the car turn the wheel for you with your hand being guided.

No hand up display and not sure if just voice to tell me to drive to lake would I do that.

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

#435

Post by dd36 »

jjav wrote: post #397
EMM_386 wrote: post #120

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. I don't fly, but what I hear from my commercial pilot friends is that many carriers are emphasizing pilots to run on auto-everything so their actual fly-the-plane skills deteriorate. And much worse, the newer generation of pilots never acquired those skills to begin with. due to relying on automation.

This seems a lot like the young people in my family not knowing how computers work despite using them daily.

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

#436

Post by nopzor »

nate_meurer wrote: post #386
GekkePrutser wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes about the airbus but the problem there is also that there is no feedback, so the second pilot can't feel what the other one is doing. But in that case (I think you mean AF447) there was a lot more going on with confusing warning indications. They did however fly a perfectly functioning aircraft straight into the sea.

It wasn't quite perfectly functioning. The pitot tubes had frozen, depriving the crew of reliable airspeed information.

you’re correct that the pitot tubes had malfunctioned, and this was a significant factor.

but the gp point has validity.

if the controls were physically linked, like they are in boeing aircraft, the pilots who were putting in opposing inputs would have realized what was going on pretty quickly.

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

#437

Post by jacquesm »

azalemeth wrote: post #216
jacquesm wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 opera…

The interesting thing about that flight is that I don't think the pilot knew how close to crashing we came whereas I had a 'front row seat' to what would have been a wingtip ground strike if we had been just a tiny little bit lower. I've flown 100's of times per year for a decade and I've never had a landing that bad. This was a short hop from Berlin to Amsterdam on Lufthansa.

I'd love to hear your dad's stories, there isn't a pilot that I know that doesn't have an evening's worth of material, so if you have the time to write that one up that would be great.

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

#438

Post by jacquesm »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #295
jackweirdy wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Amsterdam represent! :)

Amsterdam is pretty mild in comparison to Bar Yehuda, which is a good 375 meters below sea level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Yehuda_Airfield

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

#440

Post by VBprogrammer »

hoppla wrote: post #424
u801e wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise behind self driving cars that can handle most situations themselves relies on the assumption that a human operator is paying attention and can take over in situations the computer can't handle. I'm not a pilot, but it's likely that assumption can hold while flying at cruising altitude, but not so much when driving in various inconsistent road and traffic conditions.

I almost crashed into a tesla on the highway when I changed lane right behind a Tesla. The Tesla was going much faster than me, and when I changed to its lane a bit too close, it started breaking for no reason, forcing me to jump on the brakes as well. I do not believe it was the driver, but the automatic brake assist that did not like me coming in too close…

You understand that you made the mistake in that case right?
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