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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

#491

Post by throwanem »

aaronmdjones wrote: post #483
MertsA wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's heading, altitude, and speed. For example, if you're currently accelerating to a target speed and climbing to a target altitude, it won't command you to pitch up so much that you stop accelerating. The autopilot follows the flight director, and the flight director is dumb.

The autopilot wouldn't have been in use for the takeoff roll, though, would it? The question of automation smarts seems like a bugaboo in what I understand to be a highly manual flight regime.

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

#492

Post by toss1 »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #395
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…

> 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…

>>Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad actually happened here.

This is the exact wrong way to think about it.

With substantial experience with managing risk, the most important thing I know is that you MUST UNDERSTAND the difference between managing risk with knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, vs rolling the dice and getting away with it.

With risk management by knowledge, technology, planning, and skill, you can make an ordinary practice of very risky activities very safely.

But when you are rolling the dice and getting away with it, you may get away with it for a long time, long enough to think you are safe, but it WILL bite you, and hard.

"Near misses" are very clear indications that your risk management has a failure mode you didn't account for - and you are now in the zone of rolling the dice. If you do not attend to that, you are about to get bitten.

So, just because no one was hurt or died — this time — does NOT mean you can be relieved.

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

#493

Post by aaronmdjones »

throwanem wrote: post #491
aaronmdjones wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's heading, altitude, and speed. For example, if you're currently accelerating to a target speed and climbing to a target altitude, it won't command you to pitch up so much that you stop accelerating. The autopilot follows the flight director, and the flight director is dumb.

The autopilot wouldn't have been in use for the takeoff roll, though, would it? The question of automation smarts seems like a bugaboo in what I understand to be a highly manual flight regime.

Correct, autopilot isn't engaged until at least several hundred feet AGL; varying by airline. Some airlines don't engage autopilot until reaching transition altitude or even cruise altitude. Still, the flight director is giving you the same information, and most pilots will just follow that because it's the most accurate way of getting you to where you need to go... if you've set it up correctly.

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

#494

Post by andruby »

wiedehopf wrote: post #302
dghlsakjg wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is it really unexpected failures or do they discuss scenario / do you expect one of a few typical scenarios? Really throwing failures at pilots without them knowing what's going on seems to mean too many fail or rather there is not enough time to train pre-discussed scenarios and do scenarios that aren't announced. I'm not sure it's really what you'd want.

My father is a retired airline pilot and instructor. Everything that can fail in the simulator is fair game. Pilots have recurrent trainings all the time during their career. They get tested every X months. They have medical exams.

And that is how it should be. Pilots must be able to handle every possible failure. They don’t need to know every single procedure by heart, they’ve got the manuals in the cockpit for non-urgent procedures.

My father loves _flying_. He’s from a generation that trained on airplanes with little automation. He often talked about younger pilots relying too much on instruments. He would get annoyed with pilots that didn’t appreciate manually flying a plane.

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

#495

Post by kortex »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #484
quartesixte wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> more worried about the fact that lithium-ion is very flammable 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.

Metal fires (class D) are much harder to fight than petroleum fires (class B). They can burn way hotter, reignite after seemingly going out, and of course react to water to produce hydrogen.

Current fire fighter directives for putting out BEVs is either dump a loader bucket of sand on it (which most don't have yet), or drag it some place safe and let it burn out.

Also gasoline just sits there until ignited. Lithium battery packs can have various failure modes which send them into thermal runaway. Chevy Bolt EVs are being recalled en masse and owners told not to charge overnight or in a garage, least it go off unattended.

I'm very pro EV but lithium is spicy.

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

#496

Post by kingofpandora »

aurizon wrote: post #280

Arab societies are intensely hierarchical = orders from down from the top, there is no counterflow upwards. This is exacerbated by the political appointees that populate the top ranks. With an incompetent's political appointee as captain, his authority can not be challenged - even as planes crash. This manifests in quasi military groups, the the civilian air forces, which have a preponderance of ex-military officers…

Sad to see clap trap like "Why Arabs Lose Wars" used to explain anything, but especially an aircraft incident.

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

#497

Post by phil21 »

gambiting wrote: post #415
dheera wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the GPS doesn't do half the things I want it to do. "OK Google zoom in the map by 2X" nope "OK Google don't hide all the businesses while on navigation mode" nope "OK Google show all street labels don't hide them from me" nope "OK Google rotate the map to the right 30 degrees for 5 seconds" nope "OK Google show me satellite maps instead" nope "OK Google pause notifications from Facebook while driving"…

I just disabled Google assistant and all of its functions, it's beyond useless and probably the most frustrating thing I have ever used on my phone. And I don't mean just the voice controls, but all the "helpful" tips and suggestions are just bad and I can't stand them.

The sole thing I use it for is setting alarms/timers, or starting the process of a calendar appointment. Those are the two use-cases I've found useful.

Say "navigate to X" also can kinda work with less fumbling than typing half the time but it's a bit messy.

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

#498

Post by phil21 »

EMM_386 wrote: post #465
jjav wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There is a well known video among commercial pilots called "Children of the Magenta Line". The magenta line refers to a line on the display you can just "follow" around that is calculated by the computer. The video is all about how young pilots are just following around the magenta line and not having the "big picture" of what is going on in their heads.

And this video is exactly what happened here from my limited understanding. Due the the desired altitude being set at zero, the magenta line the pilot flying was aiming for was... well, set to 0ft.

I can see a longer-than-usual roll-out, but not going rate positive when you are well past V2 and hitting amber runway lights is an unforgivable mistake.

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

#499

Post by FL410 »

sokoloff wrote: post #10

Pilot (piston engine, with only around 20 hours of light jet dual). As a pax on this flight, I might not have noticed much unless I was looking out the window. This seems like a fault of the crew (obviously), but probably more on the PNF (pilot not flying) than the PF (pilot flying). Article says 4 pilots were on board, but fails to mention that 2 of them (relief pilots) were likely not in the cockpit on the departur…

> It’s hard for me to imagine that a qualified crew would fly such a non-standard departure with “we were following the flight director” as an excuse. There’s nothing above you to hit on departure; get away from terrain!

My understanding is that the 121 guys train to fly the FD and not "wing it." I think it's easier for us 91 guys to jump to the "just fly the plane" mentality.

That said, still a pretty baffling situation all around, especially the seemingly lackadaisical attitude towards post-exceedance inspection.

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

#500

Post by [deleted] »

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.

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