481–490 of 580 posts
Incorrect runway lineup led to the plane only getting airborne after the end of the runway, after smashing through the ILS antennae. They then continued onto Qatar (13.5 hours away), with bits of antenna embedded in the tail.
Never mind the passengers, this would have been pretty scary for those in the houses being overflown by a 777 at treetop height!
Biggest jet engines ever made, at tree top level, running @ TOGA power. Yeah, that woke up the neighbors. Too bad this was at night. Would have been some wild Nest cam footage during the day.
Earlier 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…
Why does it not have basic sanity checking to make sure the configured flight path is not going unreasonably close to terrain? Is it solely controlling heading and altitude or does the flight director incorporate waypoints and topology?
The autopilot follows the flight director, and the flight director is dumb.
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All I'm saying is there's a possibility of discovering the power electronics affecting us in an adverse way. Similarly how we thought lead, asbesthos, radium were harmless at first.
I’d be less worried about long term effects and more worried about the fact that lithium-ion is very flammable. It’s bad enough that airlines ban lithium of quantities no more than a single smartphone from entering the cargo bay of a passenger airliner. And then you have an entire car’s worth just strapped to the bottom of your chassis.
As is standard fuel used in combustion engines (which you know) so how does the argument of flammability hold stronger here?
Ford Pinto blew up due to tank puncture during an accident.
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It doesn't matter what the previous crew configured, because you reconfigure for the conditions and scenario you're about to fly. And this is all part of the preflight checklist. Even if something was missed, it's very strange to not realize that the plane is still on the ground when you can see the end of the runway, despite what the computers are saying. Usually pilots have trouble trusting the instruments over the…
Is there a reason for these checklists not to be automated? I would expect the pilot to set the plane in takeoff mode with destination and weight (if the plane cannot measure the weight itself) and the plane to run the checklist itself, calculate v1 and v2, check there is enough fuel to the destination, check all the control surface positions, etc.
Nothing can help you when you refuse to operate the plane correctly.
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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.
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Lead is a bad example, unless you mean long forgotten times. Even Romans knew: > The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious health problems https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-historic... Asbestos, likewise, was being used 80 years after the discovery of ill effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asbestos_disease_medic... Radium's danger was known 2 years after its discovery according…
> I think your examples support the thesis that we're actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we don't mind them. I think it's less that we don't mind them, and more that it unfortunately is a slow process to go from first research realising there's a problem to general scientific consensus to then one or both of public awareness becoming big enough that companies have to respond and stop choosing profit…
Otherwise I agree with what you say, and I'd say it agrees with what I said: we're pretty good at detecting harmful effects, and good at not taking them into account.
But that's not what the parent implied.
Earlier 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…
Why does it not have basic sanity checking to make sure the configured flight path is not going unreasonably close to terrain? Is it solely controlling heading and altitude or does the flight director incorporate waypoints and topology?
Actually doing that is a memory item, intended to be prompted by a "Vr" call from the pilot not flying. As far as I know it's not yet clear whether the PNF gave that call, but the PF certainly waited to rotate until well after reaching Vr. This is where the "sanity checking" appears to have failed, with the PF heeding the misconfigured flight director when it disagreed with other instruments and the situation visible out the cockpit windshield.
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…
> It's unbelievable This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards, which means that most of the times, when something goes wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome and you don't hear about it. But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic outcome or a very nea…
Incorrect! They exposed their pax to unnecessary risk. You do not think like an aviator.